“The Mower’s Song” is the last of the three Mower Poems that Marvell wrote around 1652 while a tutor to Maria Fairfax at Nunappleton House.
Like the “The Mower to the Glow-worms” and most of “Damon the Mower”, the poem is an utterance—as in “Damon”, a song—that addresses a now purely unsympathetic landscape from within that landscape. It follows a unique structure: five stanzas of three rhyming couplets, the final line of each an alexandrine. The last two lines work as a refrain. The last line is identical in each stanza, while the penultimate line is almost identical.
Like the “The Mower to the Glow-worms” and most of “Damon the Mower”, the poem is an utterance—as in “Damon”, a song—that addresses a now purely unsympathetic landscape from within…
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Citation: Prawdzik, Brendan. "The Mower's Song". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 August 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35653, accessed 21 November 2024.]
